by Rod Nordland
“I’m fine with that,” the donor said when he heard about it. “Of course he has to protect himself and his family. That’s his first responsibility.”
There had been no indication so far that the determination and anger of Zakia’s family toward the couple had cooled at all, and there are many such cases where families have waited years before exacting vengeance. The family of a girl named Soheila, from Nuristan, pursued her for eight years after she broke off an arranged child marriage, attacking her, the employees of the shelter where she stayed, and the man she wanted to marry, and prompting authorities to jail her.5
Soheila was a victim of the abusive traditional practice of baad, but even by the standards of baad her case was shocking. Nine years before Soheila was born, her father’s grown son, Aminullah, eloped with the intended wife of his father’s cousin, setting off years of violent feuding between two sides of their family. When Soheila was born, her mother died in childbirth. Aminullah was her half brother, by a second wife of her father’s. Her father, Rahimullah, decided to resolve the family feud by giving Soheila in baad to the cousin who’d been wronged by his son. So Soheila was being sold, at birth, by her father on behalf of her half brother to resolve a dispute that began long before she was born. When Soheila turned five, the two families tied a neka with the approval of a mullah, arranging for the celebration and consummation of her marriage to the cousin when Soheila reached the legal age of sixteen.6
No one told the girl about her betrothal until she turned thirteen, and once she knew, it did not take her long to figure out that her white-bearded husband would be sixty-seven when they wed—and she would become the fourth wife of what would be considered a very old man in Afghanistan, where the average healthy male life expectancy is closer to fifty years.7
On the eve of her wedding day, Soheila ran, going to the only place she could think of—to her maternal uncle’s house in a neighboring village. Her uncle said he would have to return her to her family the next day, and out of desperation she asked her male cousin, Niaz Mohammad, if he would help her run away. She later said she acted not out of love but simply because she had no other options, yet just the act of being alone together made Soheila and Niaz adulterers in the eyes of Afghan society and law, and they soon decided to get married. Later love came as well, and then pregnancy.
For eight years Soheila’s father and her half brother, with the help of other men in their family, pursued her and Niaz from the remote mountains of Nuristan to Kabul’s slums. They first tracked them down when Soheila was pregnant with the couple’s child, and her father persuaded the police to arrest them both on adultery charges; their baby was born in prison. Later, Women for Afghan Women managed to get Soheila and her child out of prison and took her into one of its shelters. Soheila’s family fought bitterly against the divorce case the organization brought to vacate her child marriage to the elderly cousin. They showed up in court with a dozen witnesses claiming that Soheila’s neka was not tied until she was sixteen years old. When the court ruled in her favor, the family pretended to be willing to take her back in while her husband’s court case continued and then attacked her and WAW representatives when they showed up at their home, the women in her household setting upon her and beating her and the men taking out guns to shoot at the social workers. Soheila escaped with help from neighbors, but afterward her family members threatened to kill her lawyer and called Soheila with so many death threats that she began recording them to show police. Finally, in May 2014, Soheila’s divorce from the old man was final, after a mandatory waiting period under Afghan law, clearing the way for charges against her real husband to be dropped. He had spent most of four years in prison; she had spent most of those four years in the shelter.
Eight years after she fled the arranged marriage, there was no sign that her family members had lost their determination to either bring Soheila back to marry the old man or to kill her. An Iranian filmmaker, Zohreh Soleimani, made a documentary on her case8 and actually persuaded Soheila’s father and half brother to discuss her on camera. They were unabashedly frank about what they would do to her if they could.
“If the court grants her divorce, he would say, ‘What is the court?’” the half brother, Aminullah, said of their father in the interview. “If she runs away, unh,” he said, gesturing as if pulling a trigger. “We are not afraid of dying, we are not afraid of killing. For us it is like killing a sparrow. If she is not coming back to us and goes with that donkey of a man, she will be killed.” His unapologetic vitriol was all the more extraordinary considering that it was Aminullah’s own elopement thirty-three years earlier that had caused Soheila to be sold in baad in the first place. Even more ironic, he told Ms. Soleimani in the interview, in an effort to justify the idea of child marriage, was the fact that he had engaged his own daughter to an older man when she was only three days old. More ironic still, that daughter had recently eloped herself, rather than fulfill the bargain with the old man. Despite their failures, Mr. Aminullah and his father both stick to the view that the women in their family are their property and that their rights over them are absolute.
It is a commonplace view in Afghanistan, but rare to hear it enunciated with such frankly murderous intent. Soheila’s father, Rahimullah, was if anything even worse than her half brother. “My child belongs with me,” her father said. “Me or someone from my tribe, we will find her. Even if she goes to America, we will find her. Wherever she is found, she will be killed. With all the strength that God has given me I will ask God, before they take another step, ‘God, kill both of them.’ She will be lost to both worlds.”
Soheila and her intended, Niaz Mohammad, were finally married in September 2014, formally, but it was a sad ceremony. Niaz Mohammad had contracted hepatitis in prison, and complications from that condition led to diabetes; he is too ill to work. Only a few of his own family members attended the wedding, and during it Soheila’s phone rang. It was her brother again, she said, promising to kill her, one way or another, one day or another.9
Memories are long in Afghanistan when it comes to matters of honor or perceived honor. Zakia and Ali take a somewhat fatalistic view about the whole situation, one common in their society: this is just their destiny. They are largely indifferent to the role that they and their story have played in Afghan society. They are confused when anyone suggests that they have become symbols for Afghanistan’s youth and harbingers of a change that remains elusive and distant. For all their defiance of their society’s norms, their ardor was romantic rather than revolutionary. Zakia will probably never be a feminist as anyone in the West would understand that concept. Strength of character, determination, independence of spirit—these are intrinsic character traits rather than political postures. Zakia still believes in obeying her husband, as long as he is sensible. Her husband believes in telling her what to do, so long as she agrees. They both believe in love, but it never occurred to them that this might in some way threaten the established order.
Still, Zakia will not be ruled the way so many other Afghan women are ruled. If she and Ali ever do manage to escape the country, she may well decide to learn to read and write one day, as she has said she wants to do, and Ali says he would join her if she did. Or she might decide to go to work or to school, and that would be a negotiation as it is for families anywhere, depending on how many children they have, how much money they can earn. On the other hand, if they do not manage to leave Afghanistan or decide against doing so, the backbreaking work of life on a subsistence farm may well prove too hard for such luxuries as education and literacy, at least for themselves.
Whether they leave or stay, their children, whether boys or girls, will be educated. They will choose their own mates, they will make their own lives, and ultimately it is they who will be the ones who will realize Zakia’s human potential. It is probably not a potential that she could ever really fulfill by staying in Afghanistan. “Whatever happened has happened,” as both Zakia and Ali often said, and repeat
ed when they went back to Bamiyan to face whatever fate awaited them and their daughter. “What will be, will be.”
After a fresh fall of snow in February 2015, a year after I first met the couple, Ali went out trapping birds with his brothers up in the mountains above his village. He was much more relaxed there than when he was working in the fields and the bottomland by the river; the Tajiks never climbed the mountains on that side of the north-trending gorge, and he even left his pistol at home. Ali is still a big bird lover, and the quails and snow finches he usually hunts are prized for their song as well as their meat; even the little snow finches, not much bigger than sparrows, are tasty, though they are eaten only as famine food, since their song is so pretty. Instead they are kept in handmade cages of twigs and thin branches woven together. Ali has birdsongs recorded on his phone and often holds the phone behind his back and plays them, to prompt the real birds to sing.
Snow finches are best trapped after a fresh snowfall, because charms of them forage for food on their feet but dislike snow. So the trappers scrape the snow from an area twenty or thirty yards in diameter and then lay out fish line that is so fine the birds cannot see it and sprinkle a little grain around. Every few inches there is a loop in the fish line with a slipknot, and when the birds step into it and get tangled up, the knot inevitably cinches closed until soon a slew of the birds are hopping about not aware at first that they have been made prisoners. Ali and his brothers scooped up eighteen snow finches that day and trudged home extremely pleased with themselves. “We’re such good friends, my brothers and I,” said Ali, “that people don’t even think we’re brothers.” Zakia stood near the guard dog in the unfinished gateway of their home and rewarded their return with her remarkable smile. Soon the mud house of Mohammad Anwar was filled with the chatter of the young men amid the cheery-sounding songs of their captives. Even indoors everyone’s breath exhaled frosty clouds into the thin mountain air. More than a month of winter still lay ahead.
PHOTO SECTION
Dead Father’s Daughter: Zakia’s family came from Kham-e-Kalak village, Bamiyan Province, adjoining Surkh Dar, where donkeys were their only form of transport. (Quilty)
Under the Gaze of the Buddhas: The Bamiyan Valley from the vantage point of the Great Buddha Solsal, photographed from inside the niche where the Buddha’s head had been. The shelter in Bamiyan from which Zakia escaped is on the upper plateau at the foot of the brown foothills in the center. (Sánchez)
Honor Hunters: Zakia’s father, Zaman, with three of his younger children at his home in Kham-e-Kalak, before he moved to Kabul to hunt down his daughter. (Lima)
“If you love me, I also love you”: Ali’s father, Mohammad Anwar. (Sánchez)
Mystery Benefactor: Fatima Kazimi, then the head of the ministry of women’s affairs in Bamiyan Province, who rescued Zakia from her family and later fled Afghanistan, successfully winning asylum in the United States for helping the lovers. (Lima)
Dead Father’s Daughter: The first New York Times portrait of Zakia, February 2014, while she was still held in the Bamiyan shelter. (Lima)
A Beautiful Place to Hide: The home of Zahra and Haji Abdul Hamid in Kham-e Bazargan, where Zakia and Ali twice hid while fleeing. (Sánchez)
Zakia Makes Her Move: This picture of Zakia and Ali on the run, first published in the New York Times, has become iconic, with many Afghan artists painting versions of it. (Sánchez)
Where did they ever get this idea? Holding hands is not something often done in Afghanistan, even among married couples and especially not in public. (Sánchez)
The Irreconcilables: The Chindawul neighborhood in Kabul, where the couple hid until Ali’s arrest. In this view, the Pamir Cinema building is the pale yellow building in the foreground; Ali was captured nearby. (Quilty)
Mullah Mohammad Jan: Anwar and Ali prepare for their flight to Tajikistan, buying suitcases at a marketplace in Kabul. (Sukhanyar)
Honor Hunters: Ali’s father, Anwar, near the Kabul River the day after his son was arrested. He had no idea where to go, and no place to stay. (Quilty)
A Dog with No Name: The compound of Anwar’s house in Surkh Dar, with the new guard dog chained outside. (Quilty)
“We have our proof”: Ali’s mother, Chaman; Zakia with Ruqia, age two months; and Ali, February 2015. (Quilty)
“She can smell her family in the air”: Ali, in the family home in Surkh Dar, still in hiding well into 2015. (Quilty)
“He is still nervous when he holds her”: Ali with his daughter, Ruqia, at his father’s house in the village of Surkh Dar, in September 2015. (Hayeri)
“Whatever happens, we had this time together”: Zakia and Ruqia, at home in Ali’s father’s house in Surkh Dar village, Bamiyan, in September 2015, eighteen months after the lovers eloped. (Hayeri)
“Now they will all go to school”: Ali’s parents, Anwar and Chaman, at home with their newest grandchild, Ruqia, in September 2015. (Hayeri)
Birds in a Cage: Ali trapping quail in the family fields; he keeps birdsongs on his cell phone. (Quilty)
“Enmity like this they will never give up”: Ali working the fields, armed and ready, in February 2015. (Quilty).
Still hunted, still in hiding, but happy: Zakia and Ruqia, whose names rhyme, in September 2015. (Hayeri)
EPILOGUE
Spring of the Persian year 1394 was kind to Bamiyan, thanks to a blessing of late-winter snows and early rains after a season of drought and then perfectly clear blue skies, warm with cool mountain breezes, silver birches in full leaf up and down the lanes, patchwork fields painted in the many shades of verdancy.1 There was even a dusting of downy green on the barren golden hillsides, good forage for sheep. It was the kind of spring weather that makes lovers fall in love again or reminds them of when they first did. In Surkh Dar the nights no longer needed heating, so Zakia slept with Ali rather than in the warm room with the other women and children. During their “pillow time,” as Ali referred to those minutes before sleep, they reminisced about earlier days, when their love hadn’t yet learned how to walk and talk. What happened to them then was a mystery, and nothing is quite so thrilling to young love as jointly unraveling the clues to their creation story.
“What was it for you?” he asked on one of those nights.
“You were so friendly, and I loved how you behaved to me,” she said.
He didn’t know what to say for his part, but a couple of nights later he remembered the donkey. “For me it was that time on the donkey,” he said.
“The donkey?” She hit him playfully. “Donkey?” But she remembered it, too.
He was still unsatisfied with her answer, though; it seemed too vague. A few nights later, he asked her if it was the birds, that time she was watching him playing with his quails when he should have been working in the fields.
“No, it wasn’t the birds,” she said. “It was just your good behavior to me. You were kind, and you had good character. You didn’t take hash or sniff glue or smoke cigarettes like a lot of the other boys.”
“I smoke cigarettes now.”
“You didn’t then, and you should stop.” She was always trying to get him to stop.
The next night he brought it up again; it was on his mind. “So it wasn’t the birds?”
“I never liked the birds,” she said. “Why do you keep them in cages? They have wings—they should fly. Why don’t you let them go?”
He was a bit shocked by this. “Because I love them,” he said.
THE JIHAD AGAINST WOMEN
Sherzai Amin was a pretty typical, midlevel mujahideen commander. He picked his rotten teeth with a hunting knife. He was big and slightly fat but could walk all day up a mountain on barely visible goat tracks, without breathing audibly or sweating visibly. The fifty or so fighters under his command adored him; half or more were related by either marriage or blood. Back home he had three wives and he wasn’t sure how many children. Up here in the mountains of Kunar Province, he had an eighteen-year-old Russian prisoner of wa
r named Sergey, whom he raped nightly in his camp tent, making crude jokes about it in the morning. Reports that another mujahideen unit had set up a firing squad for a group of Communist prisoners but replaced all the rifles with rocket-propelled grenade launchers brought tears to his eyes, he laughed so hard.
“Picture that,” he said.
It was the height of the jihad against the Soviets and their Afghan Communist clients, in the late 1980s, and I had been a week with Sherzai’s group, operating in the mountains east of the provincial capital of Asadabad. One evening he announced that the next day Sergey would have to guide us through what the muj thought was a minefield along our route. Sergey’s unit had planted the mines, so he should know where they were, they said. The boy broke down and cried, pleading that he hadn’t a clue where any mines were buried.
“Then you’ll have to find them the hard way,” Sherzai said, to guffaws from his men.
We sat up late that night, talking for hours, because Sherzai and I both had something the other one wanted. I wanted him not to kill the Russian boy. Sherzai wanted me to give him my Swiss Army knife. It had a built-in toothpick that he was enchanted with.
As we both danced around our real issues, we whiled away the hours talking about Communism and what it meant to the muj, what they were fighting for, what motivated them to give up everything and take to these punishing mountains.
“Divorce,” Sherzai said.
“Divorce?”
“The Communists have given women the right to divorce men.”
“Most countries allow women to divorce.”
“No, only Communist countries. And jobs, they want to send women out to work. And schools, send girls to school, sitting next to boys. They want to turn our women and girls into prostitutes. Then, when they’re prostitutes, they send them to the police or their stupid army.”
One of his men piped up. The Communists had opened a home for war widows and had distributed soap to all the women there, he said.